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rhe Early Settlement 
of Kentucky 



WW 



An address by 

BRO. CHAS. EUGENE CLARK 

K. of P. Hall, West Covington, October, 31, 1913 



The Early Settlement 
of Kentucky 



mi 



An address by 

BRO. CHAS. EUGENE CLARK 

K. of P. Hall, West Covington, October, 31, 1913 






APS 3 iSJ? 



THE EARLY SETTLEMENT OF KENTUCKY. 

AN ADDRESS BY BRO. CHAS. EUGENE CLARK, 
K. of P. Hall, West Covington, October 31, 1913. 

Chancellor Commander, Brother Knights, Ladies and 
Gentlemen : 

FROM the period of 1492, being the discovery of 
America, and from the later periods of the settlement 
of Jamestown and the landing at Plymouth Rock, to 
the time of the War of the Revolution, the pilgrims and 
early settlers and their descendants had travelled over the 
great reaches of the territory of the original thirteen states, 
then Colonies of Great Britain, had climbed the Blue Ridge 
and were looking with wistful, longing eyes into the great 
valleys and stretches of the American wilderness as they 
extended westward from the slopes of the Appalachian 
mountain ranges to the Mississippi. 

Forts Duquesne and Pitt had been established on the 
westward rivers and the hardy pioneers and hunters were 
pushing out into the wilderness that lie west of old Virginia 
and the Carolinas. 

That pioneer hunter, John Finley, along with several 
others, had penetrated the great unknown lands that bor- 
dered the Ohio, the Kentucky, the Cumberland and the 
Tennessee rivers and he, together with other daring com- 
panions, brought back to the Yadkin, the wonderful stories 
of the rich grazing lands, the vast timber country and the 
great barrens of Kentucky, which was then an Indian 
haunted wilderness, abounding in all kinds of great game, 
including the buffalo, the elk, the deer, the panther and 
the wolf. 

Daniel Boone, as a young man, listened to these tales, 
and his youthful imagination and ardor was worked up to 
that pitch that he must for himself view these enchanted 
lands, which were the paradise of the hunter and later to be 
that of the husbandman. 



In 1769, accompanied by Finley, Boone left North Caro- 
lina and was soon swallowed up in the vast wilderness that 
extended from the Great Smokies on to the Ohio, and after 
many hardships, reached that promised land which for gen- 
erations had been and then was the hunting ground of the 
Indian tribes from both North and South and which was 
the scene of their bloody encounters as they met and clashed 
on their hunting expeditions, as their parties roamed these 
forest lands and glades. 

In due time, Boone and his companion returned to the 
settlements in Carolina, and their experiences when related 
to the border and mountain folk, roused the ambition of 
these hardy people to view and possess the land with its 
great savannahs and forest glades lying beyond the Great 
Smokies and the Blue Ridge. 

With all speed other expeditions were fitted out and the 
land we now know as Kentucky received its first settlers, as 
many of these pioneer hunters built their log cabins and 
opened clearings in the wilderness, among which settlements 
were Boonsboro and Harrodsburg. 

The fierce redskins who dominated this great country 
immediately fell upon the new-comers, seeking their destruc- 
tion, and many were the lives that were forfeited to the 
tomahawk, battle ax, rifle and the torch of the Indian war- 
riors who were ever lurking about to encompass the destruc- 
tion of the settlers. 

These fierce onslaughts from the year 1769 and in the 
following decade, almost destroyed the early settlements, 
many of whose occupants were either killed or fled back to 
Carolina. 

The horrors and butcheries sustained by the settlers 
beggar description, for in the course of the early settlement 
of the then forest-burdened country, a thousand men, women 
and children gave up their lives in seeking to settle and 
subdue the land. 

The pitiless Indians from time to time were beaten off, 
but by means of their method of warfare, but slight injury 

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on the whole was really inflicted upon them. For, when the 
settlers attacked them in force and the savages perceived 
that a standing fight meant annihilation, they vanished into 
the gloomy forests, from whence they had silently come, to 
again carry fire and murder to some other lonely settler or 
hamlet. 

By reason of centuries of life and warfare in the open, 
the Indian was at home in the forest. To him, the wilderness 
was a chartered land. Its umbrage and the sky was as much 
to him a roof as the wigwam which sheltered his family. 

In all pitched battles fought man to man, the hardy 
pioneer and rifleman of the backwoods proved more than a 
match for the Indians, but these early settlers had to learn 
the peculiar methods of savage warfare before they were 
able to meet him on equal ground in the battles which were 
fought from time to time in the gloomy forests. 

As time sped on, the Wilderness Road was cut and blazed 
through the mountains down into the gloomy valleys, across 
roaring streams, along precipitous heig^hts, through the Cum- 
berland Gap into the Promised Land of Kentucky. And, 
over this Road in the course of the years, many thousands of 
home seekers with their women and children, trudged and 
rode into Kentucky, and thus ultimately possessed the land 
and made possible the later settlement of the territory North- 
west of .the River Ohio. 

The many immigrants, including the pioneer bearing 
rifleman, among whom were Boone, Finley, Simon Kenton, 
Logan, Shelby, Brady, Casper Mansker, the Dutchman 
DeHaas, George Rogers Clark, Robertson, John Sevier, the 
McAfees, and many other forgotten worthies, not only set- 
tled the land and beat back the Indians, but also formed 
flying squadrons that penetrated the farthest wilderness, 
followed the roaming, marauding bands of the Shawnees, 
the Miamis, the Twigwees, the Iroquois, and other tribes to 
the borders of the Great Lakes, and inflicted where possible 
heavy punishment upon them, by killing them in battle and 
attacking and burning their villages and destroying their 
crops. 

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These hardy men of Kentucky, who were expert riflemen 
and the greatest Indian fighters of their day, later joined the 
columns of George Rogers Clark and threaded their way to 
the Falls of the Ohio and then on to the Wabash and west- 
ward to the great prairies and sinks of what are now known 
as the overflow lands of south central Indiana and Illinois, 
to the French settlement at the mouth of the Kaskaskai and 
then up the Mississippi River to those of Cahokia and then 
on across the glades and swamps to the Creole Settlements 
on the Wabash at Vincennes. 

All of these lands were ultimately secured through the 
prowess of these Indian fighters, who crushed the allies of 
the British and conquered for themselves and their de- 
scendants the very heart of this our common country. 

Under able leadership, the Kentuckians marched to the 
Licking and then across the Ohio and fought shoulder to 
shoulder with Generals Harmar, Putnam and Wayne, being 
present at the Battle of the Fallen Timbers and at numerous 
engagements waged with the Indians at Forts Recovery and 
Defiance under the very walls and guns of the British out- 
posts on Lake Erie. 

As the country was dominated by this hardy pioneer 
stock, substantial towns for that day were erected, Lexington 
having become a city, boasting several brick buildings and 
3,000 souls, while Cincinna'ti, then known as Fort Washing- 
ton or Losantiville, was a mere collection of huts built 
around a central stockade; \Vhile Fort Dearborn, now the 
site of Chicago, consisted of a settlement of three log cabins 
on the shores of Lake Michigan. 

By reason of the vast stretches of almost impenetrable 
wilderness, the great streams such as the Ohio, the Ten- 
nessee, the Cumberland and the Kentucky became the high- 
ways for the pioneers and were much traveled. And as the 
traders and merchants of that by-gone day sought an outlet 
and a market down the Mississippi at New Orleans, and 
thence onward to the sea, for their produce, it early brought 
them in conflict with the Spaniards who held the outlet of 
the great river in an iron grip and who either imposed heavy 

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duty on all produce brought to New Orleans or absolutely 
forbade its sale. 

The early pioneers were ever independent dwellers and 
occupiers of their own land, each jealous of his individual 
life and freedom as they lived their lives in their log cabins 
situated in small clearings bounded by gloomy forests, their 
land holdings usually containing four or five hundred acres. 

It was only natural that as the settlement of the territory 
east of the Mississippi made greater headway and the pioneer 
population became in a sense congested, that the more hardy 
and enterprising wilderness farmers and hunters would 
hunger for more land and for greater freedom, and that 
they would seek to encroach on the territory of the French 
and Spaniards west of the Mississippi. 

True, to this purpose, and to that end, incursion and 
settlements were made therein, until by reason of numerous 
conflicts and after much wrangling, this great domain west 
of the Mississippi was also possessed and secured and 
opened to settlement for the hardy sons of the west who 
carried into this farther borderland the flag and sovereignty 
of these United States. 

These lands dotted with the many habitations of pioneer 
farmers and hunters who were continually penetrating into 
and besetting them were through the treaties made by Jay 
and Pinkney with the European powers thus secured for 
American conquest without further war with the nations of 
the old world, and by the later cession of Florida and 
through the treaty of Guadelope Hidalgo with Mexico, the 
lands of the southwest, and the west, became open for 
further settlement to the rolling Pacific. 

But scant credit has been given to the suffering and 
privations of these hardy pioneers who but little over a 
century ago conquered this inland wilderness. The result 
of their warfare was potent with great events for our 
country's history and subsequent civilization. 

They represented the mountain farmer and pioneer of 
Pennsylvania, Virginia and the Carolinas, who, crossing the 

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mountains, came down the troughs of their great valleys, 
floated down the Ohio, the Cumberland and the Tennessee, 
and thus, possessed the land, driving out the pitiless Red- 
skins, turning the wild beasts of the forests into food and 
commerce, and thus helped to reclaim the great northwest 
and assisted and forced by a never unceasing pressure the 
free navigation of the Mississippi from its headwaters to 
the Gulf of Mexico. 

The lives and work of these people and that of their 
descendants form a most wondrous chapter in our nation's 
history. In 1769 our own fair state, Kentucky, was then an 
unbroken wilderness; in 1792 they had peopled it with more 
than 70,000 souls and had it admitted as a State of the 
Union, while Ohio cam.e in a decade later, that is, in 1802. 

Would you familiarize yourselves with the struggles of 
our forefathers as they sought to live their simple arduous 
lives and secure themselves homes and carve a future for 
their children? 

Then read their story and spell their history which is 
largely that of our country, in the "Winning of the West," 
by Theodore Roosevelt. 

This wonderful American, patriot, statesman, historian 
and scholar, through the genius of his pen, his bigness of 
heart, largeness of understanding and ready sympathy has 
preserved to us and to the generations unborn, this won- 
drous chapter in the settlement of the western continent by 
the hardy pioneer folk who subdued the wilderness and 
opened an empire to civilizajtion and mankind. 

He has produced for us as it was woven in the loom of 
time a most wondrous tapestry in whose warp and woof, 
dyed with the blood of martyrs, he has depicted in imperish- 
able colors and unfading glory the fearful sacrifices, glorious 
deeds and brilliant achievements of our forefathers. 

In their battles, marches, conquering and to conquer the 
land for American homes, Mr. Roosevelt has gloriously 
written, "the fathers of the pioneers warred from the high 
hilled valleys of the French Broad and the Wautaga, to the 



Great Bend of the Cumberland. They followed Boone into 
the tractless and unknown wilderness of Kentucky and 
battled at King's Mountain. Their sons under Andrew 
Jackson fought the Creeks, and beat back the British at 
New Orleans, while their grandsons died at the Alamo or 
charged and cheered to victory at the Battle of San Jacinto. 
''Their warrings extended from the cold and storm-swept 
shores of Lake Erie and Lake Michigan to the semi-tropical 
valleys of the Rio Grande, and from Fort Pitt, on the east, 
across the stretches of the mighty continent to the portals 
of the Golden Gate through which swelled the long heaves 
of the great Pacific." And thus within a century was prac- 
tically conquered for this nation by these backwoods rifle- 
men and farmers, a continental empire, and from the loins 
of these hardy folk have sprung that mighty people that 
today with its hundred millions covers a continent. 



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